Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"How many are they altogether?" Jalalaad asked.

"Sixty-eight men. They have mortars, rockets, and six heavy machine guns. There are too many of them for you to sneak past them at night."

"But you sneaked past them," Jalalaad insisted defiantly.

"They cannot see me," Habib replied serenely. "I am invisible to them. They cannot see me until I am pushing my knife into their throats."

"That's ridiculous!" Jalalaad hissed at him. "They are soldiers.

You are a soldier. If you can get past them, we can do it."

"Did your men return to you?" Habib asked him, turning his maniac stare on the young fighter for the first time. Jalalaad opened his mouth to speak, but the words sank into the small heaving sea of his heart. He cast his eyes down, and shook his head. "Could you enter this camp without being seen or heard, as I did? If you try to get past them, you will die, like your friends. You cannot get past them. I can do it, but you cannot."

"But you think we can fight our way out of here?" Khaled put the question to him gently, quietly, but we all heard the urgency in it.

"You can. It is the only way. I have been everywhere on this mountain, and I have been so close to them that I can hear them scratch their skin. That is the reason why I am here. I came to tell you how to save yourselves. But there is a price for my help. All the ones you do not kill tomorrow, the ones who survive, they will be mine. You will give them to me."

"Yes, yes," Suleiman agreed soothingly. "Come, bach-e-kaka, tell us what you know. We want to share your knowledge. Sit with us, and tell us what you know. We have no food, so we cannot offer you a meal. I'm sorry."

"There is food," Habib interrupted, pointing beyond us to the shadows at the edge of our camp. "I smell food there."

True enough, the rotting pieces of the dead goat-the haram cuts from the animal-lay in a little heap in the slushy snow. Cold as it was, and even in the snow, the bits of raw meat had long begun to decay. We couldn't smell them from that distance, but it seemed that Habib could.

The madman's comment provoked a long discussion of the religious rights and wrongs of eating haram food. The men weren't rigid in the observation of their faith. They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims. They were good men of faith, rather than overtly religious men.

Nevertheless, in a time of war, and with the great dangers we faced, the last power they wanted ranged against them was God's.

They were holy warriors, mujaheddin: men who believed that they would become martyrs at the instant that they died in battle, and that they were assured a place in the heavens, where beautiful maidens would attend them. They didn't want to pollute themselves with forbidden foods when they were so close to the martyr's rush for paradise. It was a tribute to their faith, in fact, that the mere discussion of the haram meat hadn't occurred until we'd hungered for a month and then starved for five days.

For my part, I confessed to Mahmoud Melbaaf that I'd been thinking about the discarded meat almost constantly for the last few days. I wasn't a Muslim, and the meat wasn't forbidden to me.

But I'd lived so closely with the fighters, and for so many painful weeks, that I'd linked my fate to theirs. I would never have eaten anything while they hungered. I wanted to eat the meat, but only if they agreed and ate it with me.

Suleiman delivered the decisive opinion on the matter. He reminded the men that while it was indeed evil for a Muslim to eat haram food, it was an even greater evil for a Muslim to starve himself to death when haram food was available to be eaten. The men decided that we would cook the rotting meat in a soup, before the first light. Then, fortified by that meal, we would use Habib's information on the enemy positions to fight our way out of the mountains.

During the long weeks of hiding and waiting without heat or hot food, we'd entertained and supported one another with the stories we'd told. On that last night, after several others had spoken, it was my turn once more. For my first story, weeks before, I'd told them about my escape from prison. Although they'd been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they'd been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards. My second story had been about the Night of the Assassins: how Abdullah, Vikram, and I had tracked the Nigerian killers down; how we'd fought with them, defeated them, and then expelled them from the country; how I'd hunted Maurizio, the man who'd caused it all, and beat him with my fists; and how I'd wanted to kill him, but had spared his life, only to regret that pity when he'd attacked Lisa Carter and forced Ulla to kill him.

That story, too, had been very well received, and as Mahmoud Melbaaf took his place beside me to translate my third story, I wondered what might capture their enthusiasm anew. My mind scanned its list of heroes. There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them. But when I began to speak, I found myself telling Prabaker's story. The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.

I told them how Prabaker had left his village-Eden for the city when he was still a child; how he'd returned as a teenager, with the wild street boy Raju and other friends to confront the menace of the dacoits; how Rukhmabai, Prabaker's mother, had put courage into the men of the village; how young Raju had fired his revolver as he walked toward the boastful leader of the dacoits until the man fell dead; how Prabaker had loved feasting and dancing and music; how he'd saved the woman he loved from the cholera epidemic, and married her; and how he'd died, in a hospital bed, surrounded by our sorrowing love.

After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.

"So, how many goats did they have in that village?" Suleiman asked gravely.

"He wants to know how many goats-" Mahmoud began translating.

"I got it, I got it," I smiled. "Well, near as I can tell, about eighty, maybe as many as a hundred. Each household had about two or three goats, but some had as many as six or eight."

That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.

"What... colour... were these goats?" Jalalaad asked.

"The colours," Mahmoud explained solemnly. "He wants to know the colors of those goats."

"Well, gee, they were brown, I guess, and white, and a few black ones."

"Were they big goats, like the ones in Iran?" Mahmoud translated for Suleiman. "Or were they skinny, like the ones in Pakistan?"

"Well, about _so big..." I suggested, gesturing with my hands.

"How much milk," Nazeer asked, caught up in the discussion in spite of himself, "did they get from those goats, every day?"

"I'm... not really an expert on goats..."

"Try," Nazeer insisted. "Try to remember."

"Oh, shit. I... it's just a wild stab in the dark, mind you, but I'd say, maybe, a couple of litres a day..." I offered, raising the palms of my hands helplessly.

"This friend of yours, how much did he earn as a taxi driver?"

Suleiman asked.

"Did this friend go out with a woman, alone, before his marriage?" Jalalaad wanted to know, causing all the men to laugh and some of them to throw small stones at him.

In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.